Chapter 603

Arlene and her teams were encouraged to take a nap in the training area. As soon as her head hit the pillow, despite her arguing that she was too keyed up to sleep, she was out – thanks to Ship.

Two hours later, she awakened to realize that she had drooled on her pillow while in Ship’s deep, induced sleep. As she stretched, her memory returned, and the tensions of the situation came back, but she was at least fully rested.

How did I become the Wing Commander of a group of interceptors? I’m a seventeen-year-old girl. I don’t have any experience, and I don’t know anything about fighting a war. Crap, it scares me even to think about it.

Ship, amused at her thoughts, touched Arlene’s mind to say, You have led a successful raid on the enemy’s Paladins, and you did not lose a single person even though you and your team destroyed seven of them. Therefore, you are the most experienced human ever to fight an alien invasion.

It’s a good thing nobody knows how scared I was. I was just too busy to think about running.

Ship chuckled in Arlene’s mind. Remember, I was able to download every aspect of your sortie. You might convince someone else, but not me. I suggest that you and the other teams here have a hearty meal while the Prime and I bring you up to date.

After a quick shower, Arlene entered the lounge. “I need a cup of coffee about this high,” she said as she held her hands out, exaggerating, in front of her.

When she sat, Ship put a big cup of coffee, already fixed to her liking, in front of her. “Yes,” the young Wing Commander said as she took her first sip.

Within a couple of minutes, Eight and Thirteen came in and took their seats. Shortly, they all had food in front of them.

Jeff walked in, the inevitable cup of coffee in his hand. “Sorry to take away from your meal, but I need to bring you up to date about what has been happening while you slept.”

Arlene paused with a forkful of eggs on the way to her mouth. “Did we lose anyone?” she hurriedly asked.

“No,” Jeff returned, but we had problems with our first encounter with them in atmosphere. “Five attacked one of the Paladins, but another showed up, and the two Paladins overcame Five’s shields enough to inflict some minor damage before six could get into position to help. The original Paladin was venting gases when it left, but we broke off the action because Five had taken damage. It turned out to be repairable, though.”

“Is everybody okay?” Ann asked, concerned.

“Yeah, just shook up a bit. They’re waiting for Ship to repair their interceptor so they can go back and get their revenge,” the Prime said with a grin.

“One of our problems is that we can’t keep up with the Paladins’ locations. With their shields up, once they are a few miles away, they disappear for all practical purposes. At least it seems that the same thing applies to our interceptors. But once the Paladins fire, they light up the interceptors’ sensors like a Christmas tree, and apparently, the same thing goes for radar.

“I don’t know which one of you came up with the aperture idea...” Jeff started.

“It was my AI,” Arlene broke in to say.

“Well, we have used the strategy, and it seems to work better than the normal setting. The narrow beam tends to override the Paladins’ shields better, and once past the shields, it punches holes into the structure of the Paladins more easily. It doesn’t cover as wide an area, but any hole in a ship can cause problems, particularly in vacuum. There are few things inside our interceptors that aren’t important, and I imagine the same goes for a Paladin. Once the shields are down, a beam into the aft end usually results in a rather spectacular explosion – presumably from whatever they are using to store or produce the energy the Paladins use for movement, guns and shields. At least it happened on the one occasion we managed to do it so far. I can well imagine what that beam does when it hits one of the aliens. Our crews have said that the Paladin Commanders seem to be not nearly as anxious to tangle with an interceptor as they were a couple of hours ago.”

“Have they killed a lot of people?” Ann wanted to know.

Jeff’s face spoke as loudly as his voice. “They seem to have started out trying to kill as many of Earth’s people as they could, and are doing as much damage as possible, but I’ll speak to that in a moment.

“As soon as you told us what you did, I passed it on to the other interceptor crews. Our people are trying to go after the Paladins’ engines, and I think as you guys did, their shields are weaker there. Probably something to do with how the engines are constructed. However, once we started trying to hit their engines, they began to take evasive action to prevent that. Unfortunately for them, if they decide to leave a fight, the rear of their craft is exposed. We have managed to take out one of them and damaged another one while you rested. If their shields weren’t so strong, we would have taken out more. Now that they are expecting it, it is much harder to make a hit on their engines.

“We will continue to operate with a wingman – all the time. No interceptor goes out alone. As soon as you make contact, call it in to Ship so she can coordinate more backup. With the inertialess drives, we can be anywhere on the planet in seconds. Never attack unless you have a wingman right there with you. We can’t go one on one with these things. Those multiple guns and gunners and the sheer size of the Paladins make them a strong opponent. They have to be three times the size of our interceptors. Guns and shields, one to one, our interceptors are on a par with them, but dammit, there are more of them, and their craft is bigger and has more guns. Stay smart, or we’re going to lose people – unnecessarily. Don’t be misled into thinking that we should be fair and go one on one with them. This is war. A war that might be the end of our civilization as we know it. We have to win. Fight smart. Lie and wait. Hit and run. Do whatever you have to do to take those things out while keeping you and your interceptor safe. For all practical purposes, we might be all that Earth has, so stay alive and keep that interceptor functioning.”

Within a short time, startled newscasters around the world began to report that large, unusually designed craft, seemingly capable of tremendous speeds, as well as being able to hover without any visible mechanism to do so, had begun to strafe cities, airports and bases, apparently at random. They seemed to be using some type of beam weapon that exploded concrete and steel buildings with ease. At first, the newscast showed only jiggling, obviously amateur videos from cell phones as the craft rained down death and destruction, seemingly at random.

Then came a chilling video of a commercial aircraft, a Boeing 747, as an energy pulse reached out and struck. The picture was very clear as the pulse ripped into the plane setting off its fuel – the explosion visible for miles. The video was supposedly broadcast from one of the enemy craft on a local TV channel, warning that there would be many more incidents unless Earth capitulated to the “glorious Miadac.”

All the newscasts went crazy with the latest reports, many stations dispensing with their regular programming and going to continuous coverage of what was soon to be called the “Alien Attacks.”

Air forces the world over were put on full alert, and it wasn’t long before some of the fighter jets made contact – and lost. The alien craft, flying at supersonic speeds, could perform tighter turns than any of Earth’s fighter jets, and even stop and turn on a fighter that was following. Many missiles were fired at the alien intruders, but the only result was a flaring of what must be the alien craft’s shields. The alien would fire a bolt at the jet, and it would usually explode. Sometimes, the pilot would be able to eject after a hit, but most times not – the bolt was just too devastating. The alien machine seemed to have turrets that would allow it to fire in any direction, and it usually took only one of those bolts to down an aircraft.

Although the attacks were mostly one-sided, one of the Paladins’ Commanders made a tactical error and attacked a city in Southern Israel. Since the Israelis were accustomed to almost daily rocket attacks from a neighboring country, they were ready. The first three missiles that hit the enemy craft were shrugged off by the Paladin’s shields, but the missiles just kept coming. Trailing smoke, the Paladin staggered toward space only to explode and rain back down in pieces.

Since the military installation had captured the attack on camera, it was soon broadcast worldwide. The aliens could be successfully fought if their shields could be overridden. Unfortunately, that was a lot easier said than done. Several times, military jets engaged one of the Paladins, and even though their missiles often locked on, the aliens’ shields shrugged the explosion aside, or the Paladin just sped up and outran the missile. Even if several fighters fired at a Paladin one after the other, it could head for space until the missiles ran out of fuel.

The military, it seemed, could accomplish little, although it wasn’t from the lack of trying. Military bases everywhere were flying round the clock, and more than one small civilian plane was shot down by overanxious gunners on the ground. Fighter jets from every country with an air force took to the skies in search of the aliens, and the aliens wanted to be found. The alien craft could hover or move away at enormous acceleration, should they decide to. Additionally, the alien craft had shields that tended to shrug off air-to-air missiles, not to mention machine gun and cannon fire.

Within the next few days, many of the big cities of the world over were hit by these craft, and leaders from the larger nations were videoconferencing to try and devise a plan since nothing that had been tried seem to work – at least to any great extent. Nothing ... except that another craft had also been noticed, and when it was seen there were always at least two of them. When they showed up, the aliens, if the alien craft was alone, frequently broke from its attack and headed for space.

Again and again, the aliens sent a video message to the world announcing that they were the glorious Miadax, and if Earth did not submit to their rule, it would be destroyed. Somehow, the news people found out that the alien craft were called Paladins and the other craft were referred to as interceptors. No one seemed to know where the interceptors came from, but it wasn’t long until someone figured out that they had inertialess drives. Well, duhh, again. They could stop instantly from an enormous speed, then could move away at speeds that the eye had difficulty following.

That set off the news media again as the Talking Heads and the “experts” debated how the interceptors were able to violate Newton’s First Law. Where did these interceptors come from? One “expert” said there was an excellent possibility that they came from the Skunk Works – Lockheed Martin’s research and development project primarily originated for the sake of radical innovation. Others mentioned the so-called Area 51 (Groom Lake) facility, but no one actually knew the interceptors’ origin. However, over the first few days, they had been videoed taking down at least two of the Paladins.

Amazing most everyone, no country claimed ownership of the interceptors. That set off the Talking Heads again. One speculated that the interceptors came, not from some secret facility on Earth, but from another alien civilization. This civilization was the keepers of the galaxy – its job to protect less advanced civilizations from the Miadax who continued to expand and sweep up other civilizations. That set off more speculation about the Paladins, especially after one scientist wondered if the machines were capable of interstellar flight. “What about their mother ship?” he wondered on national TV. This had been mentioned before, but now the idea took hold. Where, indeed, was the ship that had transported these machines to Earth?

Then the fighter jocks, one from France and one from a U.S. base there, got a break from being mincemeat when fighters attacked the alien craft. Unintentionally for the Miadax, the two jets fired their missiles at the same time – two each – and three of the missiles hit the Paladin within a couple of seconds, overriding its rear shields. The resulting explosion was enormous, and the blast caught the French jet, ripping part of a wing off as chunks of the alien machine tore through the fighter. The pilot miraculously managed to eject and lived. There was video of the U.S. jet circling as it guarded the French pilot while his chute drifted him to earth.

Suddenly, there was a real reason for cooperation. Fighter pilots were soon training to launch together in an effort to override the Paladin shields, and some of those teams weren’t even from the same countries. “Ready ... three, two, one, launch,” almost became a byword, or byphrase as the case may be.

The Miadax, thinking to shock and awe had, instead, kicked over the proverbial hornet’s nest.

Oddly, the alien mother ship had held back, but finally, two days after the attacks began, it crept closer, and Ship moved to intercept. Jeff allowed Ship to drop her invisibility as he ordered, “Battle Stations.”

He warned the alien ship that it would be destroyed if it came closer. His answer was a volley of fire from the weapons on the near side of the big ship.

Ship rocked when the beams hit, her shields flaring as they absorbed the energy. “Do it,” Jeff said from his command seat on the bridge, and Ship’s weapons pulsed twice in quick succession. The energy of those two volleys crashed into the alien ship’s shields, immediately causing them to flash a brilliant white shading toward purple. Turning, the giant ship accelerated away.

“Do you wish me to follow and continue the engagement?” Ship asked her Prime.

“No. I will not be drawn away from Earth lest that thing get past us and fire its guns at the planet.”

“Incoming,” Helen yelled as she pointed to the screen even as Ship gave the same warning.

“What the hell is that?” Jeff said as he motioned to the cloud of something coming toward them, then came to his feet to stare at the big screen which was showing a large number of... things.

“They appear to be some type of small craft – drones,” Ship broke in to say. “Slightly more than two thousand of them, and they are armed.”

“Alert the...”

“I already have,” Helen said. “Your women are waiting for the drones to come within range.”

Ship’s shields flared as the first of the drones fired, then they were coming in droves from every side as the women operating the guns began firing back, at first with little success as they tried to hit the diving, irregular paths of the drones, but they learned, and learning, their hit averages increased. The drones were tough, though, little more than a shield generator and a gun, but concentrated fire would override their shields and explode their robust energy plants.

“The alien ship has reversed course and is accelerating hard toward us,” Ship calmly advised.

Even as she spoke, the big ship fired, this time seemingly with everything it had.

The firing from both sources was so intense that Ship rocked under the impact of all those beams hitting her shields at the same time. Well, almost all of them. The gunners and Ship’s point defenses were starting to take a toll even as the drones whirled about.

With the alien ship well within range, Ship asked permission to fire again. “Granted, but to disable if possible,” Jeff ordered. “I would love to own that thing.”